Seperated from these by a wide driveway into a good-sized parking lot at the rear, the building at the end of the block, where summer intersects with Third Street, is immediate neighbors. Unpainted irons bar block the rear second-floor windows, and two of the four vehicles in the parking lot are patrol cars with light bars across their tops and the letter FLPD on their sides. the presence of police cars and barred windows seem incongruous in this rural fastness- what sort of crime can happen here? Nothing lifting, drunken driving, and an occasional bar fight. As if in testimony to the peacefulness and regularity of small-town life, a red van with the words LA RIVIERE pausing at nearly all of the mailboc stands for its driver to insert copies of the day's newspaper, wrapped in a blue plastic bag, into gray metal cylinders bearing the same words. When the van turns onto Sumner, where the buildings have mail slots instead of boxes, the route man simply throws the wrapped papers at the front doors. Blue parcels thwack against the doors of the police station, the funeral home, and the office buildings. The post office does not get a paper.
What do you know, lights are burning behind the front downstairs windows of the police station. The door opens. A tall, dark-haired young man a pale blue shorts-sleeved uniform shirt, a Sam Browne belt, and navy trousers steps outside. The wide belt and the gold badge on Bobby Dulac's chest gleam in the fresh sunlight, and everything he is wearing, including the 9mm pistol strapped to his hip, seems as newly made as Bobby Dulac himself. He watches the red van turn left onto Second Street, and frowns at the rolled newspaper. He nudges it with the tip of a black, highly polished shoe, bending over just far through the plastic. Evidently this technique does not work all that well. Still frowning, Bobby tilts all the way over and picks up the newspaper with unexpected delicacy, the way a mother cat picks up a kitten in need of relocation. Holding it a little distance away from his body, he gives a quick glance up and down Sumner Street, about-faces smartly, and steps back into the station. We, who in our curiosity have been steadily descending toward the interesting spectacle presented by Office Dulac, go inside behind him. A gray corridor leads past a blank door and a bulletin board with very little on it to two sets of metal stairs, one going down to small locker room, shower stalls, and firing range, the other upward to an interrogation room and two facing rows of cells, none presently occupied, that seems too loud for a peaceful morning. Bobby Dulac opens the unmarked door and enters, with us on his shiny heels, the ready room he has just left. A rank of filing cabinets stands against the wall to our right, beside them a beat-up wooden table on which sit neat stacks of papers in folders and a transistor radio, the source of the discordant noise. From the nearly studio and KDCU-AM, Your talk voice in the Coulee Country, the entertainingly rabid George Rathbun has settle into Badger Barrage, his popular morning broadcast. Good old George sounds too loud for the occasion no matter how low you dial the volume; the guy is just flat-out noisy - that's part of his appeal. Set in the middle of the wall directly opposite us is a closed door with a dark pebble-glass window on which has been pained Dale Gilbertson, Chief of Police. Dale will not be in for another half hour or so. Two metal desks sit at right angles to each other in the corner to our left, and from the one that faces us, Tom Lund, a fair-haired officer pf roughly his partner's age but without his appearance of having struck gleaming from the mint five minutes before, regards the bag tweezed between two fingers of Bobby Dulac's right hand. 'All right', Lund says. 'Okay. The latest installment.' 'You thought maybe the Thunder Five was paying us another social call? Here. I don't want to read the damn thing.'
(continued)
What do you know, lights are burning behind the front downstairs windows of the police station. The door opens. A tall, dark-haired young man a pale blue shorts-sleeved uniform shirt, a Sam Browne belt, and navy trousers steps outside. The wide belt and the gold badge on Bobby Dulac's chest gleam in the fresh sunlight, and everything he is wearing, including the 9mm pistol strapped to his hip, seems as newly made as Bobby Dulac himself. He watches the red van turn left onto Second Street, and frowns at the rolled newspaper. He nudges it with the tip of a black, highly polished shoe, bending over just far through the plastic. Evidently this technique does not work all that well. Still frowning, Bobby tilts all the way over and picks up the newspaper with unexpected delicacy, the way a mother cat picks up a kitten in need of relocation. Holding it a little distance away from his body, he gives a quick glance up and down Sumner Street, about-faces smartly, and steps back into the station. We, who in our curiosity have been steadily descending toward the interesting spectacle presented by Office Dulac, go inside behind him. A gray corridor leads past a blank door and a bulletin board with very little on it to two sets of metal stairs, one going down to small locker room, shower stalls, and firing range, the other upward to an interrogation room and two facing rows of cells, none presently occupied, that seems too loud for a peaceful morning. Bobby Dulac opens the unmarked door and enters, with us on his shiny heels, the ready room he has just left. A rank of filing cabinets stands against the wall to our right, beside them a beat-up wooden table on which sit neat stacks of papers in folders and a transistor radio, the source of the discordant noise. From the nearly studio and KDCU-AM, Your talk voice in the Coulee Country, the entertainingly rabid George Rathbun has settle into Badger Barrage, his popular morning broadcast. Good old George sounds too loud for the occasion no matter how low you dial the volume; the guy is just flat-out noisy - that's part of his appeal. Set in the middle of the wall directly opposite us is a closed door with a dark pebble-glass window on which has been pained Dale Gilbertson, Chief of Police. Dale will not be in for another half hour or so. Two metal desks sit at right angles to each other in the corner to our left, and from the one that faces us, Tom Lund, a fair-haired officer pf roughly his partner's age but without his appearance of having struck gleaming from the mint five minutes before, regards the bag tweezed between two fingers of Bobby Dulac's right hand. 'All right', Lund says. 'Okay. The latest installment.' 'You thought maybe the Thunder Five was paying us another social call? Here. I don't want to read the damn thing.'
(continued)